Using the Azure Key Vault to keep secrets out of your web app’s source code

Ahead of the Global Azure Bootcamp, I’ve been looking how I could allow a distributed team to develop and deploy a web application to access an Azure SQL Server instance in a secure way. There are a few different ways that I could share credentials to access my Azure SQL database:

Environment variables – this keeps secrets (like passwords) out of the code and mitigates the risk they’d be committed to source code. But Environment Variables are stored in plain text, so if the host is compromised, those secrets are lost.

.NET Core Secret Manager tool – there is a NuGet package which allows the user to keep application secrets (like a password) in a JSON file which is stored in the user profile directory – again, this mitigates the risk that secrets would be committed to source code, but I’d still have to share that secret to be stored in plain text.

Neither of these options are ideal for me – I would rather grant access to my Azure SQL database by role and not share passwords with developers which need to be written down in somewhere, either in JSON or in my automated deployment scripts. And even though the two options above mitigate the risk that passwords are committed to source code, they don’t eliminate the risk.

So I was pretty excited to read about Azure Key Vault (AKV)- a way to securely store secrets in the cloud and avoid any risk of secrets being committed to source code.

This page from Microsoft presents a few different user stories and how AKV meets these needs, specifically around:

But after reading the document here I was a bit surprise that the implementation described still used the Secret Manager tool – it seemed like we’re just swapping storing secrets in one place for another. I searched around to find how this could be done without the Secret Manager tool, and in numerous blog posts and videos I saw developers setting up a secret in AKV, but then copying a “client secret” from Azure into their code, and I thought this really defeated the purpose of having a vault for secrets.

Fortunately I’ve found what I need to do to use AKV with my .NET Core web application and not have to add any secrets to code – I secure my application with a Managed Service Identity. I’ve described how to do this below, with the C# code I needed to use the feature.

It looks like there’s a lot of steps but they’re all very simple – this is a lot less complicated than I thought it would be!

How to keep the secrets out of your source code.

First create a vault

Add a secret to your vault

Secure your app service using Managed Service Identity

Access the secret from your source code with a KeyVaultClient

I’ll cover each of these in turn, with code samples at the end to show how to access the AKV.

First create a vault

Open the Azure portal and log in – click on the “All services” menu item on the left hand side, and search for “key vault” – this should filter the options so you have a screen like the one below.

Once you’ve got the Key Vaults option, click on it to see a screen like the one below which will list the Key Vaults in your subscription. To create a new vault, click on the “Add” button, highlighted in the document below.

This will open another “blade” (which I just see as jargon for a floating window) in the portal where you can enter information about your new vault.

As you can see in the image below, I’ve called my vault “MyWebsiteSecret”, and I’ve created a new resource group for it called “Development_Secret”. I’ve chosen the location to be “UK West”, and by default my user has been added as the first principal who has permission to access this.

I clicked on the Create button at the bottom of the screen, and the portal presents a toast at the top right to say my vault is in the process of being created.

Eventually this changes when the deployment has succeeded.

So the Azure portal screen now shows the list page again, and my new vault is on this page.

Add a secret to the vault

Now the vault is created, we can create a new secret in it. Click on the vault created in the previous step to see the details for this vault (shown below).

Now click on the “Secrets” menu item to open a blade showing secrets in this vault. Obviously as I’ve just created it, there are no secrets yet. We can create on by clicking on the “Generate/Import” button, highlighted in the image below.

After clicking on the “Generate/Import” button, a new blade opens where you can enter details of your secret. I chose a name of “TheSecret”, entered a secret value which is masked, and entered in a bit of text for the Content Type to describe the type of secret.

Once I click on “Create” at the bottom of the blade, the site returns me to the list of secrets in this vault – but this time, you can see my secret in the list, as shown below.

Secure the app service using Managed Service Identity

I have deployed my .NET Core application to Azure previously – I won’t go into lots of detail about how to deploy a .NET Core application since it’s in a million other blog posts and videos – basically I created a new App Service through the Azure portal, and linked it to a .NET Core application on my GitHub profile. Now when I push code to that application on GitHub, Azure will automatically build and deploy it.

Obviously this isn’t a full deployment pipeline – but it works for this simple application.

But I do want to show how to create a Managed Service Identity for this application – as shown in the image below, I’ve searched for my App Service on Azure.

I selected my app service to open a blade with options for this service, and selected “Managed Service Identity”, as shown below. By default it’s off – I’ve drawn an arrow below beside the button I pressed to turn it on for the app service, and after that I clicked on Save to persist my changes.

Once it was saved, I needed to go back to the key vault and secret that I created earlier and select “Access Policies”, as shown below. As I mentioned earlier, my name is in there as having permission by default, but I want my application to have permission too – so I clicked on the “Add new” option, which I’ve highlighted with a red arrow below.

The blade below opens up – for the principle, I selected my app service (called “MyAppServiceForTestingVaults”) – by default nothing is selected so you just need to click on the option to open another blade where you can search for your app service. It’ll only be available if you’ve correctly configured the Managed Service Identity as described above.

Also, I selected two “Secret permissions” from the dropdown – Get and List.

Once I click OK, I can now see the my application is in the list of app services which have access to the secret I created earlier.

Now I can just modify the Index.cshtml view and add some code to show the secret (as simple as adding @ViewBag.Secret into the cshtml) – and when I run the project locally, I can now see that my application has been able to access the vault and decrypt my secret (as highlighted in the image below) without any client Id or client secret information in my code – this is because my machine recognises that I’m authenticated to access my own Azure instance.

I can also deploy this code to my Azure App Service and I’ll get the same results, because the application’s Managed Service Identity ensures that my application in Azure has permission to access the secret.

Summing up

This was a really simple example, and it’s just to illustrate how to allow developers to access AKV secrets without having to add secret information to source code. Obviously, if a developer is determined to compromise security, they could obviously decrypt passwords and disseminate in another way – so we’d have to tighten up security for a real-world application. For example, we could have different secrets stored in different environmental resource groups as we promote our application from Dev to QA/Staging and finally to Production.

Hi Jeremy, well basically I followed microsoft’s tutorial( link at the end of the comment), I could make it work on local using azure cli to log in and successfully retrieving the secret . Then I deployed the website importing the publish profile, but it fails to retrieve the secret; it says access denied even though I registered my app in the access policies from the keyvault and added the keyvault in my web app > app settings on azure.